


Wounded Lips and Salted Cheeks

by raendown



Series: MadaTobiWeek2018 [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pirate, M/M, that one pirate au where no one gets around to pirating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-18 18:38:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15492165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raendown/pseuds/raendown
Summary: Ten years is a long time to be gone. It's amazing how much has changed - and how much hasn't.





	Wounded Lips and Salted Cheeks

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song "Beating Heart" by Ellie Goulding

“If I didn’t know better I would say that was Senju Tobirama underneath that hat.”

With the side of his mouth quirking up in a hesitant smile, the man in question raised his head to peer at the figure casting shadows in the doorway to his office.

The newcomer cut a dashing figure in what must have been a very expensive outfit before it was coated in soot and salt water. His fitted black trousers and knee high leather boots were a delicious treat for the eye of their beholder, although most of Tobirama’s admiration was focused on the large swath of chest visible through the gaping neckline of his billowing shirt, clasped shut with a very intricate belt. Raggedy black hair fell to the man’s waist, riddled through with braids and beads, and Tobirama wanted nothing more than to bury his fingers within it.

“But that can’t be; the last time I saw Senju Tobirama he was naught but a cabin brat looking up to his betters with stars in his little demon eyes.”

“A lot of things have changed since you left, Madara.” Tobirama lifted his brows until they threatened to disappear under his admiral’s hat. “Clearly much has changed for you as well. Gone a decade only to be arrested for piracy by the very cabin brat you so loved to torture. Many would call that irony.”

“I’d call that the sea gods having a laugh,” Madara chortled. There was an empty scabbard hanging from his belt and one of his sleeves was stained red.

“You look just as you did then.” The words came out quiet and filled with the shadows of a decade spent wondering. Madara shrugged, an easy gesture for a man whose wrists were bound in iron.

“Can’t say the same of you,” was all he said in return.

Tobirama turned his red eyes to the uniformed pair holding his new prisoner by each arm. “Clean him up and have his wound seen to.”

“Aye, Admiral!”

He tried not to, but Tobirama couldn’t help but notice that Madara gave no protest as he was pulled away and led towards whatever awaited him for his crimes. Nor did he look back despite the fact that Tobirama was left staring at the empty doorway for quite some time after he left.

-

“My brother searched for you.”

He had never been very good at casual. Bluntness yes but not the practice of saying a thing without the weight of all his meaning behind it. A soldier must say what he means or stay quiet and say nothing; such had been his philosophy for many years and it had served him well in reaching every goal he had ever set for himself. It was his honesty and intelligence which had shot him up through the ranks of the Queen’s Navy to find himself a decorated Admiral before reaching thirty years of age.

It did little to serve him now when faced with a man who had always been able to read him better than Tobirama wished him to.

“I figured he might,” Madara admitted from where he was lounging by the window.

“Very likely he would still be searching if he hadn’t fallen in love with an Uzumaki princess and settled down in the Whirlpool Islands. Last I heard they were expecting their second child.”

“Truly? Good for him.”

Madara didn’t even bother to look over at him, still staring through the glass with the slightly distant expression which had been hiding just under the surface of his every emotion since his ship was downed and he was taken prisoner aboard the Hidden Leaf. As much as Tobirama hated to admit it, even all these years later, he still had no idea how to read the man.

Prisoner he might be but volatile he had proved he was not and so Madara was allowed to wander the ship at will so long as he was accompanied at all times by at least one guard, for which the admiral himself most certainly counted. There were no counts of murder or undue violence against him, only the vague charge of “piracy” to which he freely pled guilty at first accusation, so he wasn’t viewed as much of a threat.

Thus began Madara’s habit of spending quite a bit of his time in the cabin which served as Tobirama’s office. It was also his sleeping quarters, although you would have to squint to find the tiny cramped sea bed among the books and papers and the innumerable maps.

Sometimes they spoke and other times they sat in silence as Tobirama worked, writing correspondence and a log of their journey, drafting essays on the scientific studies he often completed on his travels at sea. The days in which they spoke were the ones Tobirama preferred even if he would never have admitted to such a thing out loud. Although it had been a full decade since they last saw each other, there were still too many memories in his eyes whenever he looked at the prisoner in his window.

“Did he ever find anything other than a wife?” Madara’s voice broke through his thoughts and in the privacy of his mind Tobirama begged the older man to look at anything but the fading horizon.

“No.”

He knew exactly what Madara was really asking, the treasure he hoped that his old friend might have found, and Tobirama truly hated to be the one to deny him.

“Is he happy where he is?”

“Yes. Every letter that reaches me is happier than the last.”

“I’ll bet they’re absolutely covered in tear stains too. He always was a sap.”

Free to smile fondly as he continued to go unobserved, Tobirama let his eyes drift over to the small frame bolted down to his desk and the photograph contained therein. “He got worse with age, trust me. The last time I made port in Uzushio it took him half an hour to stop sobbing on me. Ruined a very good jacket.”

Madara gave a startled bark of laughter and finally turned to sit with his back to the window, raising his arms to tuck both hands behind his head and play with the braids in his hair.

“I hope it was expensive,” he teased. Tobirama sighed.

“My favorite, actually. But after he covered it in snot I couldn’t bear to put it back on.”

“Ah.” With his eyes now staring at the ceiling above him, Madara’s expression looked no less distant as he murmured, “The sea gods take as they see fit.”

Tobirama had little to say to that. It was clear that he would have no luck breaking the pensive mood his prisoner had fallen in to today and so he turned back to his papers and told himself to concentrate on nothing else. Across the cabin, Madara barely seemed to notice.

-

“How long until we make port?”

Madara tossed the letter opener in his hands up and watched it spiral through the air before catching it by the tip as it came back down. Then he casually tossed it up again as he had been doing for the past fifteen minutes.

“A few weeks yet,” Tobirama replied absently.

“I thought you said that two weeks ago.”

“Mm. That was before the storm pushed us so off course.”

The frown on his face deepened and Tobirama rolled up the map in frustration. His charts simply didn’t match up and he felt nothing so much as a failure. How could he have missed anything after searching the area as many times as he had? It didn’t make sense. And yet…

“So a couple of weeks more and you’ll be free of me then?” Madara tossed the letter opener up again. “I’ll have to talk to my wonderful guards about how to properly get under your skin. Someone needs to be up your ass once I’m gone and pull your head out of those maps you’re always staring at. Don’t you know where you’re going?”

“Of course I do. They’re not maps of this area; they depict somewhere else.”

“You’re not going to tell me where though.”

“Why on earth would I do that?” Tobirama looked over his shoulder to lift an eyebrow at his prisoner with a wry smile, more pleased than he should be to see it returned.

Catching the letter opener yet again, Madara twirled it idly between his fingers. “Right, right. Little Tobi with his big brain. You always did have to know more than everyone else around you.” He laughingly dodged the empty cup that came flying towards his head for that comment. Tobirama huffed at him.

“Doesn’t take a genius like me to see how impatient you are to face the queen’s justice. I think it’s you who is looking forward to being rid of me.” If the universe was kinder then it would not have been obvious how much pain the truth of that statement caused him. But the universe had never been very kind and, although Madara refrained from sending him a look of pity, he didn’t hold out much hope that his emotions had gone undetected.

“Think you’ve got me all figured out, eh?” Madara shot him a cocky grin but all Tobirama did was sigh.

“Not then. Not now.”

He turned back to his desk and reached for the account he’d been trying to match up with his charts. If he could only work out where he might have missed something then his life’s work would finally see its end and at last he could rest.

Behind him, Madara remained suspiciously quiet.

-

“He isn’t here.”

Only just managing not to leap in to the air with fright, Madara swiveled his head round until he laid eyes upon the young woman standing next to Tobirama’s desk. She had long hair twisted up in a vicious looking topknot and her uniform was a tad sloppier than most. The size of her arms, however, said that this was someone he definitely shouldn’t mess with.

Madara had never been good at backing down, though.

“Does he know that his crew skulk around in here while he’s gone?”

“He knows that you do and he has a hundred times more reason to trust me.” The woman’s face twisted in an ugly expression. “The world likes to think he’s changed – _he_ likes to think he’s changed – but he hasn’t. Still the same old Tobi, hopping ship to chase after you and that rat brother of yours.”

Madara was across the cabin before he even registered that he’d moved, his fingers twisted in the collar of her shirt. “One more word about my brother and I’ll beat you black and blue no matter your rank.”

“What does he see in you?” she continued. “You’re nothing but a deadbeat who ran away from home. You haven’t taken anything seriously since you came on board, you look down at him like you always did, you walk this ship from end to end and think nothing of the liberties he gives you. So tell me, pirate scum, what did he ever see in you that could possibly have driven him to sail the world over so many times just for your sorry ass?”

“For – what?” Anger seeped away in favor of confusion the longer she talked until he hardly noticed when the woman batted his hand away from her throat.

“Don’t act coy, Uchiha. You think he joined the queen’s navy for fun? The cabin kid with salt in his pockets and science in his head? Ten years you’ve been gone and he’s spent the whole time out here on the waves, looking for _you_.”

“No. That’s not – why would he do that?”

The woman snorted as she shoved him away, watching him stumble with a disdainful curl to her lip. “Beats me. You’re not worth looking for.”

Madara reeled, unsteady for the first time since he was a child finding his sea legs on the boat that he and his best friend built themselves. Hashirama had been so happy with their tiny craft, barely more than a raft with a mast, but he’d called it the FriendShip and let his little brother sit on the back, called him cabin boy and yelled at Madara whenever he pushed the young thing overboard.

And then his own younger brother had found out and demanded that he be allowed to play with them too. When Madara told him there wasn’t room enough for a fourth body Izuna had cried and run home, swearing up and down that he’d build his own boat and that none of them could sail on it. A week later the sea had swallowed him and Madara had never seen his little brother again. Seventeen years old, full of desperation and guilt, his mind had refused to accept that Izuna could be gone and he’d done the only thing that made sense at the time. 

He fled their poor little fishing village and turned to piracy, using his freedom outside the law to search and search until the day his past caught up with him in the form of the Hidden Leaf.

“It wasn’t his fault,” he heard himself say. “It was mine.”

“You think its _guilt_ that he’s hung on to all this time?” The woman snorted again and shook her head, slamming her hand down on the maps Tobirama spent so much of his time poring over. “He tore that cove apart inch by inch trying to find Izuna for you. He caught the first passage out of town against his brother’s wishes trying to find you. He joined the navy and he did his time until they gave him a ship of his own and all this time he’s been _looking for you!_ ”

Madara flinched. Why Tobirama might have entered the queen’s service never occurred to him. Sure it had seemed strange that a mind so wild and curious as his had always been would have subjected itself to the rigid rules of the navy. But as he had for the past decade, Madara had thought only of himself.

In truth, his heart had given up a long time ago and admitted that his brother lay buried beneath the tides. Only stubbornness and a lack of anywhere else to go had kept him at the helm but now he wondered: had he always had somewhere else to go? All this time he had been longing for home, had home been searching for him?

Both he and the woman before him startled and whipped around when the door to the office opened. Tobirama stepped inside with sea spray still wet on his boots and glistening in his hair, a suspicious expression immediately falling across his face when he spotted them there.

“Touka,” he nodded shortly to the woman.

“Cousin,” she replied to Madara’s surprise. That would explain her familiarity with Tobirama’s motives.

“Did you need something?”

“I was just leaving.”

And she did leave but not without sending Madara a look full of acid. Tobirama caught her eye as she passed him and returned the look with enough venom to quicken her pace, leaving the two of them alone as they usually were.

“Have an interesting conversation with my first mate, did you?” As always, he failed to sound as casual as he would have wished to. Only this time Madara finally understood what he had been hearing since they were all just little boys sailing the bay of a tiny fishing town.

“No,” he lied. “We didn’t talk about much.”

The words tasted strange in his mouth.

-

“Where did you say your brother dropped anchor, again?”

“In the Whirlpool Islands.”

“Ah.”

Madara fidgeted and shifted his weight, his shoulder brushing up against Tobirama’s where the other man stood perfectly still at his side. Although he was certain that a week ago he wouldn’t have noticed, it occurred to him that in all the time since he’d come aboard this vessel, this was the closest they had been to each other.

They watched the horizon together for the first time as Madara contemplating the noose soon to tighten around his neck. Shore was in sight and despite all the many weeks he had spent in this very room it still felt as though he hadn’t had long enough.  

He’d thought he wouldn’t care if he died. He’d also thought there would be no one esle left in the world who would care if he died. Apparently he’d been wrong on both counts.

“I hear Uzushio has really nice weather all year round,” he murmured.

“So it does,” Tobirama replied, his confusion at that statement as clear as day in his voice.

“Will you settle down there with him?”

Shifting his own weight, although he was more careful not to brush up against the man beside him, Tobirama kept his eyes pointedly forward. “I don’t know that I ever will settle down.”

“Not even if there was something to keep you there?”

“Perhaps then, yes. But I don’t truly belong to Hashirama’s family, although I’m certain brother would be more than happy to see me. His princess would not take kindly to me inserting myself in to their lives in such a manner as I would without any other attachments.”

“Ah.” Very carefully, Madara leaned sideways just until their shoulders touched and held there. “I also hear that Uzushio won its freedom from the crown and is no longer considered a part of The Colonies.”

“That is true, yes.”

Without looking away from the horizon he twisted his wrist until their fingers were touching, not reaching, not presuming, but presenting the offer and hoping that all the sea gods who could possibly be listening might hear his fervent prayers. “How would you feel about staging a mutiny and running away with the fastest vessel in the queen’s navy?”

He barely had time to blink before he found himself being spun around and shoved up against the wall of the office cabin. Tobirama left the man no time to question his intentions as he crashed their lips together and vented a lifetime of frustration and yearning, a decade of worry and pursuit. Pale fingers buried themselves within dark braided hair and twisted as though hoping to stay tangled there forever. Both of them groaned in to the heat of each other’s mouths, their bodies pressing together, rocking with the motion of the sea beneath their vessel and the tides within their souls.

Knowing they didn’t have much time, Tobirama forced himself to pull away before he lost his head entirely. His chest heaved as he pressed his forehead against Madara’s the way he had been dreaming of since they first set sail on the back of a barely floating raft together.

“We’ll pass in to the bay within an hour. If you want me to mutiny my own ship we need to get going now or we’ll be within canon range of the others at port before I can turn any of the crew to my side.”

“Right. So, Admiral.  Yo ho, yo ho?”

“It’s a pirate’s life for me,” Tobirama finished in a dry voice, trying to contain his smile and failing wildly. Madara laughed at his efforts.

“No regrets?”

“I went to sea to find you,” he said softly. “And now I have and I won’t let you go.”

“Been waiting for the offer?”

Tobirama looked rather dashing with a blush across his cheeks. “Hoping.”

“Let’s go then.” Madara skimmed his hands down the hard body pressing his against the wall until they rested on a set of gorgeous hips, displayed so nicely by the admiral’s uniform. He pulled Tobirama in for one more kiss before they tore themselves apart and turned to face the doorway.

Neither of them looked away from the door and yet both reached out at the same time to entwine their fingers together. As Madara reached for the handle, Tobirama reached for the saber at his belt, tossing it and trusting his partner to catch as he then reach for the pistol just inside the breast of his doublet. They shared a grin before Madara pulled the door open and they stepped out on to the deck together, facing the midday sun and whatever the sea gods had in store. 


End file.
